Billie’s Blues
Are Mine
My gardenia scented getaway
suicide not for fame
dulling color fades today
I’m no Sylvia Plath mama,
sexy Anne Sexton, tragic Ophelia
won’t go out mad martyr style
but sometimes the slide of
silky fingers collide with my
sensibilities
sing a song of the lovely siren
that is the Lady
The smoky sad jazz
of Billie beckons me
blue deep, onyx sea
palette watery grave,
my gardenia-scented getaway
The greasy trombone
melodic boom of bass
guitar, light fingers
play piano keys,
tap in Morse code
the misery
through music,
honey butter songstress,
the bleeding heart
of Billie’s mantra
my gardenia-scented homegirl
Sheets cover the windows
keeps the room cool and dark
when La Catrina speaks
bleached bone and bourgeois,
her skeletal thin-skinned
hand soothes me.
she hums death dreams,
lulls me to sleep,
smooth jazz reprieve
Silky fingers of subjugation
offer rest from the rage
that burns the heart, chatters
away my brain, thumps
my sleep out from
its groove, the
xylophone of my rib cage,
cradle to the downcast heart,
Silly moon.
So many odes
to that old girl
have they made,
Ms. Holiday, a goodmorning
to heartache,
in her solitude going bad,
singing away
like no one can,
my sickness of sadness
You Frida lady,
Lady Lazarus,
Supernova woman
posturing pain
whispering,
muerto
muerto
muero
Llorona leave me be
prayers allow me to
channel la chola loca,
putita bruja
high hair,
devil-may-care
barrio bitch.
Something is passing
through these veins again
haunting my heart.
hopelessly hypnotic
a Homeric epic, needing release
heroin overdose all dressed
up and nowhere to go
needling straight to
the cardiac arrest,
slipping the noose around
the songbird’s neck,
snap shut the nightingale
who will sing less and
less and less
knowing this day will come
again,
and I will do as Dylan says and
Rage, rage, rage against the
dying of the light
And only if,
how I wish,
wonder if,
his villanelle
encompasses
the ladies too
and not just
the deaths of
fathers and old men
Tomorrow is a Zach de la Rocha
day,
Charles Bukowski, Diane Wakowski,
A pinche puta Cisneros day.
Tomorrow will be
walk on Washington,
bulldog-battle along the border,
a fight for the brown
but today I sit
in the lovely gray,
the cleansing rain,
of Lady Day
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